[Forum] Schedule Task information required

[thehawkVB]

Good morning.

First of all I apologise for the "double" as I posted something similar on vbulletin.org but I believe this is the place where I should have posted it in the first place.

My scenario is the following and I would kindly appreciated any help you may be able to give me.

I have a product installed with which I can schedule a thread to go online at a specific time of the day, let's say 2am in the morning. My problem is that at that time of the day I have 0 activity on the Forum so the page does not load, the footer cron call is not made and the thread never goes online.

So that's question one
Is it possible for cron jobs to run regardless of the activity?

I can "solve" the above problem by running a scheduled task myself that loads the page every one minute or so but I still have a second problem, that if I have three scheduled tasks to run at let's say 02:00, my job might end up running at 02:03 because if I understood correctly when the call is made, only one cron job is run.

So that's question two
Is it possible for cron jobs to run simultaneously?

Finally, let's say there is no solution for the two above issues and I schedule my schedule task to run every two minutes(I create three tasks from the Schedule Task manager) to be 100% sure that a thread goes online when I want it to.

So my last question is
Would there be a negative performance impact if my php file runs so frequently, every hour?

Thank you.

[josiah]

From where have you got the idea that chronological actions cannot be performed simultaneously or that there must be activity on the forum in order that they are performed ?

[thehawkVB]

I am 100% sure that if there is no activity the crons don't run, it's tested and also confirmed by "Steve Machol" (Customer Support Manager) by Googling for "Also if there is no activity on your forums, the task won't run.".

And I can also 100% confirm that they don't run at the same time. My forum is offline, only I can access it and if I have three tasks scheduled at 11:20 and I refresh the page, only one of them runs. I re-refresh and the 2nd one runs, and so on.

I now have a fourth question

I set-up a cron job on my server that runs once every minute so theoretically problems 1 and 2 are "solved". The cron job is running the wget command on cron.php that needs a random number.

Can someone please confirm the below is correct and will not cause any problems?

cron.php?rand=9999999999

Is it safe to always use "9999999999"? I mean, is it safe to always use the same number and speaking of numbers, what type of number is that, I want to make sure not to go beyond the range of this number data type.

Thank you.

[Trevor Hannant]

1. You're correct in that Cron jobs require activity for them to run. No activity, no run although it should pick it up again when there is activity.

2. As far as I'm aware, anything scheduled for the same time should run OK - certainly there are default tasks which are setup in this manner.

3. That depends entirely on how much it needs to process! If it's only looking at a single part of the database and is only processing one record then it shouldn't present any issues on your load

4. I'm afraid I don't know that one. One of my colleagues should be able to pick that one up later...

[thehawkVB]

Thanks a lot Trevor, very kind, I will wait for a final answer on #4 just to make sure that things are done.

[Lynne]

There was a modification on vbulletin.org that would convert your scheduled tasks to actual cron jobs. I've never used it and don't know the specifics of what you need to do, but you may want to look into it.